BALTIMORE, Md. - President
Clintons recent announcement of a plan to subject junior high students
to gay-inclusive tolerance lessons reminded Americans of the ongoing threat
of homosexual promotion in the nations public schools. But few parents
realize that the homosexual lobby is also targeting private including
religious schools with its message to impressionable children that
gay is OK. Six years after the Children of the Rainbow controversy
in New York City, homosexual activists are stepping up their campaign to
expose grade school students even kindergarteners to pro-homosexual propaganda.

About 150 teachers and administrators
from mostly elite private schools in Maryland and D.C. gathered February
2 at the Maritime Institute outside Baltimore for an all-day conference
aimed at guiding educators on how to bring homosexual-affirming programs
into their schools.

The conference, sponsored by the
Association of Independent Maryland Schools (AIMS), featured a workshop
on lower schools in which kindergarten and first-grade teachers discussed
ways to introduce their young students to homosexual themes.

I have a first grader who is experiencing
homosexual tendencies, said Jennifer Barrett, a young teacher at the prestigious
Sheridan School in northwest Washington, D.C. (tuition: $12,000 -$14,000).
Her reasoning: the boy plays with girls rather than his own gender.
Barrett said the child was developing a poor self-image, insisted, I feel
its my job as an educator to make sure he feels good about himself, and
wanted the other teachers at the workshop to tell her how to achieve her
goal.

Not a single participant in that
session attended by this reporter objected to the idea that Barrett
should encourage the boy to feel comfortable with his supposed latent homosexuality.
Not a single person remarked that he might not be a pre-homosexual at all
and that there have been plenty of kids who have grown out of such tendencies
with the right kind of advice and training. Instead, the focus was on how
to help such children feel comfortable about themselves by exposing them
to pro-homosexual lessons in an age appropriate way. (One teacher
did coach Barrett on the politically correct terminology, advising her
to describe the boy in terms of gender nonconformity rather than homosexual
tendencies.)

A National Campaign

This was the second AIMS conference
dedicated to placing sexual orientation programs in member schools
many of which, like St. Pauls School for Girls, near Baltimore, are religious
or religiously based. (Sidwell Friends School, the ritzy Quaker school
in the District of Columbia that counts Chelsea Clinton among its alumni,
is one of the more than 100 schools affiliated with AIMS.)

The second keynote speaker at the
conference was Emmy Howe, a lesbian parent and activist from Cambridge,
Massachusetts, who participated in the AIMS workshop on lower schools.
Massachusetts leads the nation in pro-homosexual school programs
spending $1 million annually (and a proposed $1.5 million next year) on
its taxpayer-funded campaign to affirm homosexual youth. Homosexual activists
from the liberal state are promoting their model to educators in other
states with missionary zeal.

Indeed, homosexual advocates are
using a plethora of strategies to encourage young schoolchildren to adopt
positive notions about homosexuality.

Among them:

Holding classroom discussions about
alternative families, including those with homosexual parents;

Promoting gay-inclusive and anti-homophobia
curricula;

Encouraging homosexual teachers to be
open about their sexual orientation in class;

Using teachable moments (e.g., correcting
a child who uses the word gay as a putdown) to guide young school kids
into politically correct attitudes about homosexuality.

The Pre-Homosexual Child?

The AIMS conference certainly conformed
to the activists agenda. The first keynote speaker was Dr. Justin Richardson,
a Harvard-educated psychiatrist and director of Columbia Universitys Center
for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Mental Health, and guess what?
a homosexual to boot. Did any of the teachers or school administrators
present think he might be biased in his advice? No one cared to challenge
him on that score.

Richardson said educators need to
aid the pre-homosexual child with a supportive school environment, paving
the way for his later coming out. He claimed that a childs sexual orientation
is determined very early in life around four years of age, he suggested
so why not prepare the pre-homosexual child for the inevitable?

Heterosexual children wont be affected
by pro-homosexual affirmation in schools, he told the teachers. Richardson
said he is often asked by concerned parents, Will this [submitting children
to a pro-homosexual environment] make my kid gay? Will sending my
kid to this school make my kid more likely to be gay? And you want
to be able to lay that one to rest, and I think science has really done
that for you.

Healthier Lesbianism

Two years ago, Richardson sounded
the same deterministic theme, addressing parents who were concerned because
several eighth-grade students at an elite New York City school their children
attended had declared themselves bisexual. He advised them, according to
a New York Times story, not to worry: [I]f this is a girl who has
a genetic predisposition and early experience to grow up to be a heterosexual,
then bisexual experimentation will probably only help her clarify that
she is more attracted to males than to females.

However, if she started life on the
path to being a lesbian, teenage experimentation might help her to develop
her lesbianism in a healthier way than if she were forced to ignore her
true desires until adulthood. Translation: lesbian experiences are actually
a plus.

Richardsons morality is atrocious,
and his science is suspect, at best. (Consider the recent phenomenon of
famous lesbians like Holly Near and JoAnn Loulan, author of the advice
book Lesbian Sex, who have stunned their comrades by falling in love with
men.) He offered no scrap of evidence that homosexuality is determined
at four or thereabouts. Indeed, at the AIMS conference, Richardson,
while maintaining that genes play a major factor in the development of
homosexuality an assertion clearly unproved also acknowledged
that environment plays a role. (He cited a study that found that
on average, homosexual men report that they had a worse relationship with
their father than heterosexual men with their dads.) Well, if environment
can help turn someone into a homosexual, why should schools provide that
kind of environment?

One reason behind the widening acceptance
of gay-positive programs in schools, Richardson said, is the growing recognition
... that theres a genetic basis for homosexuality, which has caused people
to begin to conceive of a pre-homosexual child.... But the accelerating
acceptance of pro-homosexual programs in schools is traceable more to the
growing power of the homosexual lobby than any scientific evidence.

Ironically, a week after Richardsons
AIMS speech, the liberal Boston Globe reported that enthusiasm for gay
gene research has waned among scientists and homosexual activists.
The Globe reported that six years after a widely reported study (by a homosexual
researcher) purporting to locate a genetic marker for male homosexuality,
the gene has still not been found ... There is growing consensus that sexual
orientation is much more complicated than a matter of genes. (Emphasis
added) Moreover, the prestigious journal Science recently repudiated
its own 1993 study, ballyhooed by the media, by a homosexual researcher
purporting to find a genetic basis for homosexuality.

Promoting Homosexuality in
the Name of Safety?The title of the AIMS conference,
Making Schools Safe II, suggested its ideological agenda. In recent
years, homosexual advocates have implemented homosexual-positive programs
in schools by arguing that they are necessary to protect gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgendered students from getting teased or, worse, committing
suicide or being physically attacked by their peers.

While everybody in the pro-family
movement supports protecting students from harm, many have voiced
dismay at the idea of espousing pro-homosexual school programs in the name
of safety since homosexual behavior, especially among males, has
been linked to numerous diseases such as Hepatitis A and AIDS. But
when a Catholic mother in the audience asked the soft-spoken Richardson
about the health risks associated with homosexual behavior, including AIDS,
he dismissed the connection.

I think an effective strategy to
protect against AIDS is really to encourage people to practice safe sex
and not to talk about risk groups, Richardson said. The best thing
would be to teach heterosexual and homosexual adolescents and adults to
use a condom. Thats a much more effective strategy than telling them
not to have sex with certain kinds of people.

Richardsons condescending advice
flies in the face of data by the Centers for Disease Control, which has
consistently reported a majority of AIDS cases tied to homosexual sex between
men (and IV drug use). Moreover, condom failure is exacerbated by
the unnatural act of anal sex, one of several dangerous gay sex practices.
Even liberal sex advice columnist Dr. Ruth Westheimer discourages anal
sex as high risk, recognizing that it causes damage to the body.

The same woman at the AIMS conference
asked about Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the California psychologist who founded
the National Association for Reparative Therapy of Homosexuals (NARTH),
which counsels men and women who want to abandon their homosexual identity.
Richardson tagged NARTH a fringe group thats not respected by their colleagues
psychiatrists or psychologists, and noted that the American Psychiatric
Association recently condemned reparative therapy.

Richardson said studies show that
this sort of treatment not only doesn't change someones actual sexual orientation
that is, their attractions though he did admit that it can change their
behaviors. But he said that behavior change often comes at great
cost, which is significant damage to their self-esteem and their ability
to be honest with themselves.

Richardson apparently subscribes
to the circular reasoning used by fellow activists: those who claim to
be former homosexuals either never were really gay to begin with or they
are merely forcing an unnatural change in their behavior and are still
suffering.

Richardsons claims aside, there are
literally scores of studies, articles and personal testimonies demonstrating
that there are plenty of bona fide ex-homosexuals who have turned into
happy heterosexuals. Nicolosi pointed to an 860-respondent study
commissioned by NARTH which shows that "as clients diminish their homosexuality,
their self-esteem rises.

Clients come to us with damaged self-esteem,
Nicolosi said. They don't want to be gay and they've been told there's
no hope. He said NARTH has brought relief to hundreds of people who
wanted to change but had nowhere else to turn due to the strong pro-homosexual
bias of the mental health establishment.

But we dont have to rely solely on
Nicolosis evidence. Back when the study of change for homosexuals was not
politically incorrect as it is today, numerous sexologists and mental health
professionals reported success in helping homosexuals overcome their unwanted
gay desires. Famed sex researchers Masters and Johnson reported a
71.6 success rate of homosexual-to-heterosexual change in 1979. In
1987, New York psychoanalyst Dr. Rubin Fine wrote, I have recently had
occasion to review the results of psychotherapy with homosexuals and been
surprised by the findings a considerable percentage of overt homosexuals
became heterosexuals.

Moreover, Richardsons dismissal of
change for homosexuals ignores the many men and women alive today who have
overcome homosexuality through therapy, Christian conversion or both.
People like Anthony Falzarano, a former gay male prostitute who had over
400 sex partners but is today happily married to wife Diane and the father
of two children and former lesbian Yvette Cantu of the Family Research
Council are living proof that the idea that homosexuality is fixed
and immutable is just a myth.

Affirming the Pre-Homosexual
Child

In the lower schools workshop, Richardsons
notion of affirming the pre-homosexual child seemed to embolden the 28
teachers and parents in attendance. The discussion was led by Lina Ayers,
a lesbian parent whose child, Lauren, attends the Friends School in Baltimore,
a Quaker school. Ayers explained how, in an effort to ensure that other
children would understand Laurens two moms, she and her lesbian lover (who
also attended the AIMS conference) won permission from the school to read
Heather Has Two Mommies, a pro-homosexual childrens book, to all first-grade
students. (She whited-out the books biological sections describing artificial
insemination.) The school notified parents by letter of Ayers classroom
visits only after they occurred, but nobody complained.

Although this belated notification
surprised a few teachers at the workshop, even that was too much for Anita
Marcus, a kindergarten teacher at Green Acres School in Rockville, Maryland
(tuition: $12,200), who asked Ayers, What did they have to send a letter
home for? Im wondering what will it take to get to a place where
it just is not strange and revolutionary to discuss [homosexuality]
I mean, when I had a big conversation in my kindergarten class about gays
and lesbians I didnt send a note home that said, Guess what we talked
about today? and I didnt hear anything [back from concerned parents].
Marcus school, Green Acres, has a sexual orientation program that includes
talking about alternative (gay-led) families to elementary-age children.

Ayers classroom visits highlight
another factor behind the pro-gay education push: homosexual parents
with school-age kids are seeking to reduce the social stigma they face
from classmates by pressuring school administrators to adopt pro-homosexual
tolerance and diversity programs. The model for this parenting strategy
was Emmy Howe, the closing keynote speaker who became the Cambridge, Massachusetts
school districts first-ever liaison to homosexual parents. Howe urged
homosexual parents to get as involved as much as possible in volunteering
at their childs school to win friends for the homosexual cause.

In the Q & A period after his
speech, Dr. Richardson recommended that the educators use the film lesbian-produced
film Its Elementary (financed in part by James Hormel, President Clinton's
ambassadorial nominee to Luxembourg) for teacher training. The film
shows elementary school teachers giving pro-homosexual lessons to young
children, and includes a clip from a gay pride pep rally of sorts at a
Quaker elementary school in Howes hometown of Cambridge, Mass.

Once you have the vocabulary to talk
with young children about homosexuality, it becomes very easy, said, Richardson,
who received enthusiastic applause following his speech.

Such comments and the multi-faceted
gay campaign to expose impressionable young students to homosexual propaganda
demonstrate that parents can no longer assume teachers will guard their
childrens innocence even in kindergarten and even in some of
our nations finest private and religiously-based schools

Peter LaBarbera is president of Americans
for Truth about Homosexuality (703-491-7975, www.americansfortruth.org),
which publishes the Lambda Report. He is a contributing editor to
Human Events and is working on a book about the homosexual agenda in Americas
schools. LaBarbera is also editor of CultureFacts, a newsletter of
the Family Research Council.

I am against
homosexuality but I must make it clear that this does not imply I am supportive,
in any remote way, of violent attacks against homosexuals or harrassment
of homosexuals. I do not in any way support those responsible for the murder,
physical assault and abuse of homosexuals.

I am supportive
of intellectual debates but not of taking the law of God into our hands.

What upsets
me most about the above report is the fact American Schools will spend
this much time an effort on gay awareness when it has yet to begin to spend
this much time on cultural and racial awareness. If I were a betting man,
I would be willing to wager that these school systems involved in these
homosexual awareness programs have yet to include studies on the history
and culture of various Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latino groups
around the world.

Much of
the reason for the racial tension which is prevalent in American society
is ignorance. A child can go through nine years of historical studies in
grade-school, however; that same child will have never learned of the history
or culture of peoples out side of Europe and post-Colombian America. For
example, I attended school in Oakland, California in my first years of
elementary school. There we learned of the civil rights movement and a
small part of African history before the advent of slavery; this curriculum
started with the first and second grade.

Shortly
afterwards, my family and I moved to Sacramento, California for the sake
of better education and opportunity. I the nine years of historical study
to follow, all that was thought of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East was
World War II, slavery, and the Crusades; respectively. Each account of
the event painted the non-European regions in a negative light. Asians
where Communists and supporters of Hitler's, Africans where poor primitive
slaves, and the whole of the Middle East was the scourge of Europe. This
is what we where taught. And to this very day, America can't seem figure
out how to ease its racial tension.

What these
homosexual groups are achieving, is exactly what minorities in America
have been trying to achieve for decades. It all starts with the child,
if the child learns nothing about a group of people but the stereo types,
and has no contact with those people, then it stands to reason that they
will carry that ignorance and, in some cases, hatred into their adult life.
When they taught us about the "Dark Ages" they should have taught us that
while Europe was wallowing in the stagnation of it's own dark ages, the
rest of the world, particularly Asia and the Muslim Empires, was at its
apex of social, economical, and scientific achievement. When they taught
us about the Renaissance, they should have told us that it was a direct
result of the Muslims of Northern Africa who liberated Spain and Italy
by defeating the various Gothic tribes. When they taught us of Columbus,
and celebrated his birthday, and of Vasco da Gama, they should have taught
us of the atrocities which followed each of there achievements. And when
they taught us about the Egyptians and the Amazons they should not have
portrayed them as being white. They couldn't separate them from African
history, so they decided to simply incorporate them into European history.

The homosexual
groups that are doing this, are trying to eliminate a vein of persecution
which exist in American society. A minor persecution that many of them
may have felt while attending grade school. However; this should not take
precedence over eliminating the artery of ignorance and hatred in American
society by using the tactics which gays are proposing to seal the racial
and cultural divide. If we do not do this, then the grade school atmosphere
will be such that a boy who plays with girls rather than boys will not
be teased for doing so, while those girls he's playing with harass and
alienate the young Muslim girl because she wears a hijab. For the sake
of future generations we must seek this goal more fervently than the gays
are seeking theirs.

And finally,
to everyone I ask this question, Why would we want sexual orientation of
any type to be taught to our young children? Isn't that something that
is personal and should be dealt with at home by the parents when ever they
see fit? After all, the school system's job is to educate children, not
to raise them, that's the job of the parent.